Hi everyone,

I haven't blogged in a while. Sorry for the break. I'm back from a vacation in Mexico with great ideas on my company's direction. I look forward to sharing them. I'm also off to SAPPHIRENOW/ASUG conference in Orlando tomorrow. I'm sure I'll bring something interesting back to blog about.

I've been meaning to write a blog on where SAP E-Recruiting is in the market, and what SAP needs to do with it. I have been working almost exclusively with SAP E-Recruiting for eight years now, so I have a keen interest in it's future success.

Where We're At

This summer we'll see the Ramp-Up (or limited shipment) of SAP Enhancement Pack 5 (EhP5) to a small number of customers. There are improvements in many areas of SAP HR, including E-Recruiting. These enhancements are mostly around streamlining the online application experience and improving the application dropoff rate. There are also some improvements in the new hire interface with integration to the new talent profile. EhP4 saw a huge improvement in the usability and functionality for recruiters with a brand new user interface. In between EhP4 and EhP5 SAP delivered Support Packs with additional functionality, as well as huge performance improvements for the management of high volume requisitions. They have been busy beavers.

At the same time the market is changing rapidly. Applicant Tracking System vendors are springing up like weeds, including attractive super low priced options (http://www.catsone.com/). Taleo, SuccessFactors are expanding their footprint, iCims is becoming a threat to Taleo in recruiting technology, and everyone is talking about Workday (who for the moment are partnering with Taleo and Mr Ted for recruiting).

Why would an organization spend significant time and money implementing SAP E-Recruiting? My reasoning hasn't changed much. It's:

• Integrated and enforces company-wide compliance in the recruiting process. Recruiter's don't really care about this. HR, the OFCCP and other people are fans.
• Super scaleable and global, supporting clients such as Microsoft (85 countries), Comcast (pool of 1.2M candidates), US Postal Service.
• Extensible. Organization's can make it support whatever processes they have, integrating to any third party vendor, supporting any user interface technology, etc. This has a downside as going outside of a standard solution costs money and needs supporting.

There's also the usual valid arguments around owning your own data, the ROI of paying maintenance and internal support versus annual on demand costs, etc.

At the end of the day it may be super powerful but SAP E-Recruiting is still just an Applicant Tracking System that is integrated to HR. It's not not an end-to-end Talent Acquisition solution. Many clients don't need anything beyond what it delivers.

For those with greater functional requirements, you can integrate E-Recruiting to other solutions or build out functionality. I saw a Workday presentation where they showed traditional ERP as an old tractor with a spoiler on the back. I think they were trying to be more polite than say "lipstick on a pig". I think this analogy is a bit too self serving. SaaS solutions cannot be extended, and your organization needs to adapt to their functionality. For clients that need to extend the solution, I see E-Recruiting as a solid talent acquisition platform. My analogy would be modified street cars where the same platforms of Subaru, Toyota, Honda, Mitsubishi are consistently used due their ease of modification.

Now that we've outlined what I like, let's talk about what is missing.

What Needs to Happen

Specific vertical industry requirements aside, there are gaps in the existing supported processes. In addition, the solution needs to be broadened to cover the many aspects of candidate sourcing.

Assuming resources and budget are limited (otherwise E-Recruiting would be more advanced) I'd do the following:

• Focus on enhancing functionality that showcases integration. Offer management functionality integrated to Compensation, cost of hire tracking tied to time and finance, and employee referral portal integrated to Personnel Administration and Payroll are examples. Integration with Supplier Relationship Management (SRM) for contingent staffing would be huge.
• Drop the "We support open integration and vendors can certify against us" already and just build integration to a few key job boards and aggregators. The "allow others to certify against us" doesn't work when there are hundreds of applicant tracking systems integrating with these job boards. In the world of ATS, the big job boards are the 40,000 pound gorilla and SAP is a siamang.
• Buy, build, or partner with a hosted candidate sourcing provider. JobVite Source (http://recruiting.jobvite.com/products/source/) or TalentHook are two examples. The existing on premise Netweaver stack is not conducive to social networking mashups and sourcing data from web sites. I'm sure lots of ABAP developers may disagree with me.
• Build assessments integration to some key vendors and also provide an open assessments interface.
• Add some basic CRM-like functionality.
• Offer a lot more public APIs and promote mashups and extensions by third parties, without them having to go through the expensive certification process.
• Lower the price so that customers can integrate third party sourcing solutions and still get a good ROI.

I'm sure there's a lot more I'm missing. Focusing on the above would not cost a lot of development days and would have a huge impact. Let's see what SAPPHIRENOW brings. Perhaps I'm focusing too much on the current ERP offerings and SAP may be have a whole new social networking platform up it's sleeve. As always, let me know what you think.

See you at SAPPHIRENOW!

Cheers, Mark